


A Sage's Path

by admiralty



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode: s04e05 The Field Where I Died, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:22:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26418640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/admiralty/pseuds/admiralty
Summary: He’s never believed in heaven, it sounds far too easy. And quite frankly, boring. But this, he can get onboard with: souls lasting forever, like starlight, persisting through time and space. Another chance at life.It’s a nice thought. And Fox Mulder has little room to spare for nice thoughts.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 26
Kudos: 115
Collections: X-Files Episode Fanfic Exchange (2020)





	A Sage's Path

**Author's Note:**

  * For [red2007](https://archiveofourown.org/users/red2007/gifts).



> Prompt: We KNOW who his soulmate is. So, fix it. Rewrite it, change it, add on, in whatever way you want so long as we know and HE knows and maybe in a canonical way she knows.
> 
>   
> Rachel- I believe "The Field Where I Died" does tell us Mulder and Scully are soulmates, so rather than change anything, I've written my interpretation of the episode along with some extra reassurance. I hope you like it!
> 
> Thanks to Monika, Kasey, Fiona, Jaime, Cecilia, Nicole, Lin & Laia (whew!) for your beta and feedback.

**_“I, too, have spent a life the sages' way and tread once more familiar paths._ **

**_Perchance I perished in an arrogant self-reliance an age ago_ **

**_and in that act, a prayer for one more chance went up so earnest, so..._ **

**_instinct with better light let in by death that life was blotted out not so completely,_ **

**_but scattered wrecks enough of it to remain dim memories..._ **

**_as now, when seems once more... the goal in sight again.”_ **

  
  
  


**_Part I. Sullivan Biddle_ **

  
  


It begins and ends in a field.

Tall grass, ecru, waving at his knees. Foliage in the distance, a hint of the disappearing sun behind them. He sees a vision: imagines himself standing in a Tennessee meadow looking at two photographs in his hands. He’s lost, sad somehow. He doesn’t know who the people are in the photographs. He doesn’t understand, not yet; but the goal is the same as it has always been for Fox Mulder: truth. To find it buried somewhere within the unknown; to seek it, to grasp it, to wrench it free from that which would obscure it.

At first, this is like any other raid. The banging of doors, the heavy footsteps of agents on the ground, the cocking of weaponry. And after that it’s just a feeling. He feels it the moment he sees the field through the window: an overwhelming sense of death, the weight of lost life, the fallen. 

He attempts to shake it off; categorizes it as a bad premonition: his suspicions that this will all end in tragedy regardless of the FBI’s efforts. Just another one of his spooky hunches. It’s only a feeling, after all. Scully would think it silly if he mentions it. 

But then he steps outside as if in slow motion, his ears pricked back like a German Shepherd on the prowl, and an incredible sensation of déjà vu comes over him. As he wanders out into the field, he knows this is more than just a feeling. He can no longer ignore the prickling sensation that blankets his forearms, the way his heart rate picks up as his gaze lingers on the gently swaying tall grass. This is not just a trick of the mind, a fluke, a familiar yearning for something incredible. This, whatever it is, is very real.

He has been in this field before.

He hears a voice in his head: a female voice. It’s familiar, somehow. He follows it. He soon realizes it’s not in his head, that Scully can hear it too, and when they lift the trapdoor and look down into the bunker, he sees the stranger. And he knows.

He just knows.

***

Hours pass as Melissa Riedal-Ephesian is kept in custody. Mulder is being kept in custody by his own relentless brain, the thoughts that now pour in, his unstoppable mind at work. Somehow, some way, he knows what this must be, even though the possibility has never seriously crossed his mind before.

_Past lives. Reincarnation._

He’s never believed in heaven, it sounds far too easy. And quite frankly, boring. But this, he can get onboard with: souls lasting forever, like starlight, persisting through time and space. Another chance at life.

It’s a nice thought. And Fox Mulder has little room to spare for nice thoughts.

The odds of encountering another person from a past life, not to mention being able to identify that person as such, seems incredible, even to him. But for some reason he can’t quite put his finger on, Scully’s refusal to indulge him this time is infuriating. 

They drive back to command, Melissa Riedal asleep in the back seat. Scully sits shotgun, her gaze fixed upon Mulder in that all-too-familiar way, blue irises flashing in defiance, even in the darkness. The road whizzes by fast, making him almost dizzy with frustration.

Her role in his life right now is to be his partner, his protector. It is her literal job to watch his back. And she has her work cut out for her, what with his history and penchant for fantasy; four years with him has surely brought her to this point. But as Scully’s predictable skepticism flares up once again, he completely loses his cool.

“You were there, Scully!” he yells angrily. “You saw it, you heard it. Why can’t you feel it?”

She looks back at him, a bit shocked. A little hurt, perhaps. A flash of gold nestled in the hollow of her throat glints in the moonlight and he feels his irritation simmering. He cannot understand. Here and now, why this time? This place? _You’ve always given me the benefit of the doubt, Scully. Even when you doubt._

“How could I know about a bunker in a field where I've never been?” he presses. Waiting for her rebuttal, her explanation. She holds her ground, as he expects her to do, and presents him with a counterargument he has no response for.

“And why is it that Vernon Ephesian is, reported by you, a paranoid sociopath because he believes that he lived in Greece a hundred years ago, and you're not, even though you believe you died in that field?”

She’s right; she’s right and he knows it. He hates when she does this, but loves her for it all the same. It’s what she does, it’s why she’s with him: to keep him honest in a world where he knows the truth, however elusive, is all that matters.

What feels like several tense minutes pass before he finally speaks again. He loosens his grip on the steering wheel and glances her way. “Why is this so unbelievable to you, you, who wears that cross around your neck every day?”

Scully shakes her head, closes her eyes. He senses her body language shift, immediately identifying it as discomfort. She doesn’t answer, probably because she doesn’t know.

“This all just feels too familiar, Mulder,” she says with a heavy sigh. “You seem a bit obsessed.” She looks behind her briefly, then out the window. “With this woman,” she adds quietly.

Mulder glances to the backseat, where Scully had just looked. Where Melissa Riedal is snoozing.

“This isn’t about her, Scully. It’s about saving lives.” 

He feels odd justifying this to her, as if they were lovers and she was jealous. He knows that isn’t it at all, _it’s not like that,_ he tells himself, but he feels it anyway, as often happens within his partnership with Scully; a thread of confusion weaving in and out of their existence. It’s always there, he just never follows it. What exactly they are to each other seems to change regularly. Constantly. 

“Is it really, Mulder?” she asks. 

An understanding passes between them that of course the priority is the lives of the members of the temple. They’re FBI agents, and this is about stopping a very probable madman with a very probable stockpile of lethal weapons. 

That’s what this is about. Agent Scully is well aware this is Agent Mulder’s top priority, as it should be.

But Fox Mulder’s friend Dana Scully isn’t asking him that question, and he knows it.

“It’s about... discovering something incredible,” he confesses. “We’re on the cusp of some hidden truth that I may have the ability to unlock, and here you are, like you usually are, telling me to stop.”

Mulder takes a deep breath, instantly regretting the dozens of times he’d pressed her in the past to take a leap, to open up her mind. This time, this case, things are different. He _feels_ this and he can’t explain to her how or why it’s different when she refuses to feel it herself. 

Why is it different? Why is it so important to turn this feeling he has into truth? And why is it so important Scully goes there with him?

“Is that what you think I’m here for, Mulder?” she asks quietly. “To stop you?” She sounds slightly upset, as if he’s challenged her and she’s ready to see how serious he is. 

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just… I wish that you’d trust me, Scully.”

She leans back into her seat, exhaling loudly. “If it were me having this experience, I might feel the same way you do.” He is surprised at this revelation, however small. “But I know you, Mulder,” she continues, eyeing him carefully. “You are more susceptible than most, and I fear your desire to believe in something extraordinary can occasionally override your judgment.” She glances briefly towards the back seat at Melissa. “Not to mention the effect your indulgence could have on her.”

She waits for him to reply, but he has nothing. His eyes are on the road ahead, the path that leads back to the base and to the hypnotist whose services, despite Scully’s protestations, he plans to avail himself. 

The path that forever brings him closer and closer to truth.

She seems to know he will do this with or without her approval. “You’ve done this before, Mulder,” she warns quietly. “You’ve done this already and although I didn’t know you when you did, I do know your life was forever changed because of it.”

He closes his eyes. He should have known she’d bring Samantha into this. He bites his lip, sets his jaw. Afraid to say something he might regret.

“I do trust you, Mulder,” she says, with relief that the argument seems to be over. “Of course I do. And if you believe this is the best course of action forward, the best way to find those weapons in time, I will trust your judgment.”

She reaches out to touch his bare forearm just beneath his rolled-up sleeve, and suddenly it hits him again: another feeling, like the one he had when he first saw Melissa Riedal. He looks over at Scully, meets her eyes, and for a brief moment their gaze locks in a timeless coupling; as if the car were a sensory deprivation tank and nothing else around them existed at all. 

She doesn’t notice anything unusual, at least not in the way he does, and her tongue darts out to moisten her lip, her eyes doing that half blink he’s so used to that he sees it in his dreams. “I’m just worried about you, that’s all. Okay?”

Shaking off the feeling, he nods, accepting this truce. 

_***_

She brings him the photographs, lays down the evidence. 

“I’ve been thinking about this, Mulder,” she says very seriously. Sarah Kavanaugh peers up at him from the photograph with sad eyes. “And it’s possible you’ve simply been the victim of the power of suggestion.”

He’s weary, unable to defend himself anymore. She continues.

“The road leading to the temple is named Kavanaugh Road. And there’s a sign a mile out that indicates that field is called Sullivan Field. You may have subconsciously processed those names as we arrived.”

 _It doesn’t explain everything, Scully_ , he wants to say. He always wants to say this. She can’t quantify his experience with her science, with her logic. Not this time. Quite simply, he wants to believe.

But instead, he nods. He’ll let her have this one, at least for the time being. “Thank you for bringing me these, Scully.”

She nods, bites her lip. “You’re welcome.” She says it gently, and he knows she doesn’t take it as a triumph, or even believe this is truly over. But she presses no further. “Ephesian’s being taken down to his arraignment,” she continues. “He and Melissa are going to be released soon.”

“Dana-” he begins, looking at the table. He rarely uses her given name but he wants her to listen to him, really listen. “If, um… early in the four years we’ve been working together an event occurred that suggested or someone told you that…” he looks up at her, “...we’d been friends together in other lifetimes… always... wouldn’t it have changed some of the ways we looked at one another?”

Scully eyes him thoughtfully, and for a brief moment he thinks she entertains the idea: that there is a reason for their connection, a reason for their enduring friendship. 

“Even if I knew for certain,” she says, “I wouldn’t change a day.”

She smiles then and he takes her meaning: they are exactly where they are meant to be.

Together.

_***_

It’s been a couple of days since the mass suicides and here he sits, just as Scully had predicted: obsessed. She has left him to his devices this time. It’s funny how sometimes she knows when to leave him be, and sometimes she doesn’t. Either way, he wants her there. 

He thinks of the piles of dead bodies he’d stepped over in the temple, any law enforcement agent’s worst nightmare, and particularly Melissa Riedal, curled on the floor in a fetal position, clutching the photograph she’d torn down the middle and pocketed back in the holding cell.

_“We have come together in this life, this time. Only to meet in passing.”_

Whatever he believes about past life regression, one thing had been clear from the start: Melissa Riedal was not meant to be in Fox Mulder’s life for long. In this life, this time, she would flitter in and out like a waking dream. 

She’d wanted to believe, but couldn’t get there. Not in time, at least. And while the loss of life devastates him, he’s somewhat relieved they aren’t meant to be. It never felt right.

_“I don't believe that you feel responsible for those fifty lives. You are only responsible to yourself, Mulder.”_

He wonders if Scully would say the same thing now. Perhaps she knows, as he does, that in the end it doesn’t matter what she says. They are responsible, they will always be responsible. The weight of those lives is heavy, like Old Marley’s chains, and links are added with each passing year.

Scully brings him coffee and sits with him as he silently combs the archives in his latest quest: finding all of the information he can about Sullivan Biddle and Sarah Kavanaugh. Ultimately he stumbles across some rather troubling information about Melissa Riedal’s supposed past incarnation. A Confederate nurse, he expects to find that. A lover, yes.

He does not expect to learn she had been a Union spy.

The sensitive Confederate intel Sarah Kavanaugh had leaked to the North had made her partially responsible for the very slaughter in Apison that had cost her true love his life. Mulder remembers enough of his Civil War history to know that the correct side had won, of course, but the politics don’t change the probability that behind those eyes, behind the tears, behind Melissa Riedal had been not only Sarah Kavanaugh’s love but her guilt.

Surely Sullivan Biddle, a Confederate soldier who had given his life for the South, hadn’t known. Perhaps the two of them were fated to be taken away from each other as much as they’d been fated to be together. 

This saddens Mulder, but is somewhat comforting. The complexity of human nature can’t be molded into black and white certainties. Not every person finds their true love, be it in this life or any life, and even if they do, not every love is perfect. 

He listens to the tapes again, hears his own voice saying things he cannot remember saying. He’s done this before, for years, in fact: compulsively sifting through the tapes of his childhood regression. It had struck him at the time how calm he’d sounded, how at ease he’d been while recalling the events of Samantha’s abduction. 

These tapes are different, however: he sounds agitated, even conflicted. Maybe on some level, Biddle had known? Denial, perhaps, is the strongest reaction to betrayal.

He rewinds the tape again. Listens to himself describing another time, another life: Kristallnacht; sounds of shattered glass in the air and Gestapo lining the streets like sentinels. 

“ _I see my father._ _He's dead in the street. He is Scully._ ”

He wonders at this. Oddly, he thinks of Scully in the car right before the regression, worried, protective. Almost parental in a way he’d never really been able to experience as a child. 

_“But now... he's gone on now... waiting for us.”_

He stops the tape.

 _Waiting._ Waiting… for what? He’d been so focused on Melissa Riedal, so wrapped up in his fight against the clock, his race to save fifty lives, that he hadn’t given his connection to Scully in the regression much thought. He hadn’t taken the opportunity to really listen to what he’d actually been saying. He presses play again.

_“The souls... come back together... different... but always together... again and again... to learn.”_

He isn’t talking about Melissa Riedal. He’s talking about Scully. 

He rewinds the tape. 

_“But now... he's gone on now... waiting for us. The souls... come back together... different... but always together... again and again... to learn.”_

_To learn._

Why had he said that? To learn? What is he meant to learn?

_“I'm rising... I'm rising now... I'm rising now... high above... my body. Above the field. My face is bloody. Near the bunker... the federals are gone... my sergeant is also dead. He is Scully.”_

_Sergeant._ Mulder smiles as he thinks of the hundreds of times Scully has been the one to whip him into shape. It makes a strange sort of sense: that Dana Scully, _his_ Scully, is the one person who seems to play every role he could possibly need in every life.

It occurs to him that in both of his recollections, in both of his memories of his past lives, he’d mentioned Scully before Melissa. His mind had searched for her first. And in both scenarios, she had just died. 

_To learn._

What does this mean?

His mind reels as he thinks of everything he’s learned about the concept of past lives, which isn’t much. He thinks of Melissa; how he’d desperately tried to convince her to believe him. _“I want to believe,”_ she’d said, but she’d taken her own life instead.

He then thinks of Scully, who has always been afraid to believe: always argued, always battled, always rolled her eyes. But even so, she’d never denied him. Even in this case, when believing was the last thing she seemed to want to do, she’d gone down to those archives and searched. Not only for weapons, not only for the requirements of her job, but for him: for Mulder. For Sullivan Biddle and Sarah Kavanaugh. If it hadn’t been for Scully, he might never have known the truth.

Mulder looks down at the newspaper article in his hand, the evidence of Sarah’s betrayal of the South. Melissa wasn’t meant to be his soulmate in this life: she’d told him herself that they were only to meet in passing. But maybe he’d been wrong about everything he thought he’d known about soulmates. Maybe the same person isn’t meant for us in every lifetime, at least not in the way we would expect. Maybe it isn’t that simple. Certainly Sullivan Biddle would have agreed if he’d known the truth.

_If he’d learned._

Mulder’s eyes widen. The goal, in sight again.

  
  
  
  
  
**_Part II. Fox Mulder_ **

  
  


When he looks into Scully’s eyes, there is a part of her that, despite her stubbornness, he knows believes in him. Maybe not in aliens, maybe not in the paranormal, but in him. And he trusts her with his life. It’s almost always been this way. 

When he’d first laid eyes on Melissa Riedal he’d felt a powerful connection, but could not explain it. He’d barely had any time to examine it, for he’d somehow known their time together would be short. But now, with the case well behind him, he can recall another moment in his life where he had a similar reaction: when he’d met Scully. It hadn’t been an immediate sensation like it had been with Melissa; more like a gradual one, but it had been there all the same. 

Their first case in Oregon, his initial feelings towards Scully were those of distrust. He’d believed she was sent to spy on him. There had only been a hint of it; his natural instinct was always to protect himself and his work, but even so, he’d subsequently wondered why that distrust had taken hold within him at all. 

Now it makes perfect sense.

Sullivan Biddle would have been blindsided by the knowledge that his true love had betrayed him. Maybe it wasn’t what was supposed to happen, maybe it was. In any event, he’d died before he could learn it. 

Maybe he’d died so that Mulder could learn.

While he’d had no shortage of disappointments in his life over the years when it had come to his personal relationships, his distrust of Scully had never settled well in his chest. Even at the start, he’d wanted to trust her. And when he made that decision, that trust was powerful to the point of overwhelming.

In that motel room in Oregon it felt like Scully had already been his friend forever, like he had known her for much longer than he actually had. The personal details over the years have been scant but the feeling has always been there; that feeling of knowing a person intimately. 

When the rain pounded against the window of that motel, and she looked into his eyes and said _“You’ve got to trust me,”_ he did. He had no reason to, other than his gut. His heart. 

His soul had known.

_***_

_They walk in a field somewhere, hand in hand. He feels the breeze dance across his face, her hand resting easily and comfortably inside his. He has nowhere to be but right here. It feels as if the entire world is within his grasp._

_There is no time here, in this place: he cannot sense what their clothing looks like, where they are, any identifying information that could orient him. He cannot even see her face. There is only the feeling: the connection, of her and her alone._

_Just as before, he sinks deeper and deeper into his past… or is this the future? It doesn’t matter, he supposes. It’s endless, this love he feels, this trust. It extends through time and space, across distances he cannot fathom._

_He doesn’t look at her, doesn’t turn his head to see the face of the person whose hand he’s holding._

_He doesn’t have to. He can feel that it’s Scully because it has to be._

_It must be._

***

He doesn’t remember when the dreams began. At first it's only hazy: just feet walking in tall grass, then the field. Then Scully; the feeling of her, the comfort of her hand in his, if not her face. 

He has this dream often over the years, however. He has it the night he finds out her cancer has gone into remission; the welcome knowledge that she will not be taken from him this time. Not again.

He has it after he tells her she’s made him whole, kept him honest, and that he could never do what he does or be who he is without her by his side. 

He has it again on a night when it rains hard against his window, the night they at last give in to their powerful feelings; the night when she herself admits there may indeed be such a thing as fate and it has finally, finally brought them together in the way they’ve so long denied themselves.

Each time he has the dream he edges closer and closer to understanding, to the answer: learning every day what Scully really means to him.

And he sees the field again when he dies. 

He’s rising... rising now... high above his grey, naked body. Above the field. His face is covered with scars from the torture he’d endured aboard the spacecraft. Near Absalom’s compound... Jeremiah Smith and the other members are gone.

He sees Scully holding him. She is sad.

  
  


***

While he is underground, deep down beneath the earth, he ascends to some unfathomable, ethereal plane. It is here he meets Melissa Riedal again. 

She beckons to him, holding out her hand. Tells him not to be afraid, that this is the way things work. Death is a natural state of this and every life; that they will meet again, and again. That he will meet his sister again. His mother, his father. 

_The souls come back, again and again, different but always together._

She doesn’t mention Scully, and part of him knows why, on some subconscious level. Perhaps Melissa feels like their souls belong together but he does not. The heart wants what it wants; the mind will fight it as long as it can but eventually the heart will win.

_Scully._

He shakes his head no, refusing to let go of this life.

_We’ve had so little time together. It’s too heartbreaking to wait. I don’t want to wait anymore. Not again._

He curses himself for how much time they’d wasted. If only things could go back to the way they were before: just he and Scully against the world.

Melissa’s eyes flash. “We’ve been here before, you and I. Right here. Do you remember?”

Mulder shakes his head, for he cannot recall.

“The last time you died. You weren’t ready to leave this life then, either.”

Mulder thinks, reflects, and like a story being played out before him he remembers. A boxcar, the burning New Mexico desert sun. An old Native American ritual.

A message for Scully.

_“I have been on the bridge that spans two worlds, the link between all souls by which we cross into our own true nature. You were here today, looking for truth that was taken from you, a truth that was never to be spoken but which now binds us together in dangerous purpose. I have returned from the dead to continue with you... but I fear that this danger is now close at hand... that I may be too late.”_

He remembers.

“I wasn’t ready,” he agrees. “I couldn’t leave her then and I don’t want to leave her now.”

Melissa tilts her head and he looks into her eyes, seeing inside them a multitude of different versions of her, like silhouettes. Men, women, children. He wants to know them all, the inherent curiosity that has driven him forward his entire life powerful even in death. But above all else, more powerful than his mortality, even, is his desire to be with Dana Scully again.

If there were a deal with the devil to be made, he’d make it. Melissa seems to realize this, as the color in her eyes dulls and she retreats. 

“Are you the woman in the field?” he asks. “In my dream?” He doesn’t want her to be. There’s only one woman in the world he could ever think of as his soulmate and it isn’t Melissa Riedal.

“You choose your own fate, Fox Mulder,” she says with a wistful smile. “We know each other in this and every life. But what we do not know is what we are to each other in each life. The souls come back... always different, but together, again and again, to learn.”

He looks at her, seeking understanding. “What is it I’m supposed to learn?” 

She takes his hand and speaks an answer so obvious he can’t believe it hasn’t occurred to him before. 

He knows it, though; he’s known it for years.

“The truth.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**_Part III. Dana Scully_ **

  
  
  


It ends where it began: in a field. 

Scully wakes in their bedroom disorientated, emerging from a heavy nap. Out of the edges of her sleepy eyes she can see the tops of the trees waving back and forth in the summer afternoon breeze.

Rolling out of bed, she makes her way over to the window, surveying their wide front yard. The terrain is oddly familiar in this moment; a large area of tall grass that extends to their front gate, as large as a football field. Familiar not just in the way she’s looked out this window thousands of times before, but in a different, more mysterious way.

She sees Mulder standing in the yard, looking down at something in his hands, and she suddenly knows why it’s familiar.

She’s tried not to think about the Temple of the Seven Stars for twenty years. She’s failed to do so, many times. But this memory is somewhat welcome: an image of the man she loved- even though she had not yet known the precise way she loved him- standing alone in a field, mourning something beyond her comprehension.

They haven’t mentioned this particular case to each other since it happened. It doesn't surprise her; they’ve encountered the unthinkable over and over, and rarely revisit these assorted shades of hell. But some unknowable force compels her to head downstairs, to walk across the field and take his hand like he’d done for her so many times in their front yard over the years.

“Hey,” she says softly, as their hands join. “What’re you doing out here?”

She can’t see what he’s looking at. He looks up, staring off into the distance. She loves that about this yard: they are so far removed from civilization it truly feels like it’s always just the two of them out here. 

“Just thinking about fate,” he says. “Do you believe in fate, Scully?”

She smiles, remembering fondly the first time they had this conversation. She moves closer, squeezing his hand. Beside him, always beside him. “Not when it comes to you.”

He turns slightly to look at her, an eyebrow raised. “What do you mean?”

She shrugs. “So much of my life has been out of my control. A lot of pain, a lot of heartache.” She meets his eye. “But you, on the other hand… that’s always felt like my own choice. Always.”

“Even when you left?” he asks, without missing a beat.

“Especially when I left.”

He kicks the dirt a bit in a thoughtful way she recognizes so well it’s as if they’ve been here before, somehow. They have, really; thousands of times. 

He lifts the object he’d been holding and hands it to her. It’s a photograph, probably about a decade old, of the two of them in bed, underneath the covers. Mulder is taking the picture, his sleepy face smirking into the lens, hair mussed, overgrown beard, and one pupil reflecting the flash, the other red. She is snuggled against his chest looking up at him, focused. In love.

Her heart drops. The picture is in two pieces, torn down the middle.

“Where did you find that?” she asks quietly.

“Spare closet,” he replies. “Was moving boxes around to make room for the baby stuff.”

There’s a sickening feeling in her stomach, and her hand moves to the tender swell of life she’d only quite recently told him about. 

“What made you do this, Scully?” he practically whispers. He tries to hide the hurt but it’s there. They’d already hashed all of this out; it should be water under the bridge at this point. She tries to remember what exactly had caused her to tear the photograph. It had been a million things, it had been nothing. 

She takes the pieces from him. “Does it matter now?”

He nods. “It does, because whatever I did that made you do that, whoever I was then… I never want to be that guy again.”

“I loved that guy.”

“You left that guy,” he retorts, and it isn’t with recrimination. He’s simply stating a fact. But she hadn’t left because she stopped loving him. She didn’t think she could ever stop loving him. She’s told him this already. 

“What’s really bothering you, Mulder?”

He shakes his head. “I’m sorry, I’m not angry. I don’t mean to dredge up anything unpleasant. It’s just…” he looks up at the horizon, at the edge of their yard. “You told me once that even if you knew we were destined to be in each other’s lives forever you wouldn’t change a day. I guess I’m wondering if that’s really true.”

“I’m pretty sure we were talking about reincarnation at the time,” she reminds him. 

“We were, but it’s a conversation I kept having with myself long after we finished.”

There’s a breeze in the air, drifting past them, almost as if it were eavesdropping. “How so?”

“Soulmates,” he says wistfully. “Even though you thought I was crazy, I knew it had to be true.”

She smiles, reminded of the reason she’d come out here. “I didn’t think you were crazy, Mulder. I was just worried about the effect it would all have on you.”

He still has that dreamy look on his face, that smile he gets when his beautiful mind is at work. “I always knew we’d end up together.”

This surprises her. “Even way back then?” She’d never questioned the strength of their bond, even at the time, but it had taken her quite a while to admit to herself she’d actually been in love with him. She knows he’s being genuine, but she still is curious to hear his reasoning. 

“It wasn’t always like this for us, as you know,” he says. He turns to her. “I didn’t understand that at the time. But I know now. You’ve been so many different things to me over the years, you _are_ so many different things to me now, and- if you can bring yourself to entertain the notion, Doctor Scully- even through time and space, and across the stars. Friend. Lover. Protector. Partner. Yes, even a parent, sometimes,” he laughs, and she thinks of all the times she’d fretted over him, stroked his hair back like her mother used to do to her. 

He takes her hand and brings it to his lips. “The souls come back differently, but always together. To learn. Until we get it right. And we did get it right, eventually.”

“Eventually,” she grins.

“I still knew though, Scully,” he says. “All that time. That we were meant to be together in some way, somehow. Always.”

“I think I did too,” she admits. 

“Really?” He raises an eyebrow.

“Well, I don’t know if I believe in any of this ‘soulmates’ stuff…”

“Shocking,” he mutters with a smile.

“...At least, not the way the ancient Greeks believed it. That all humans started with four arms and four legs and two heads, and were split in half, searching for their other half for all eternity.” 

“How do you know we weren’t split in two at some point?”

She looks down at the torn photograph, then grins and leans into him. “The height difference, Mulder. It never would have worked.”

He chuckles. “I figured you’d find a way to debunk that.”

She nudges him playfully, then gently tucks the torn pieces into his pocket. “I know what I did feel… what I’ve felt ever since we met. That you were the only person I could ever imagine myself with.”

He nods thoughtfully. “So then,” he says with a deep breath, bringing them back around. “If you thought that, then tell me.” He pulls the picture out, the half that’s just him. “If we were meant to be together, why did this happen? Why did you go away?” He looks thoughtful, remembering something. He then says quietly to himself, “We’re always taken away.”

“You said that about Melissa Riedal,” she points out.

He shakes his head. “No, it wasn’t about her, Scully. It never was.”

She rolls her eyes. “Well, sure, you’re saying that now.” 

“No, I’m serious. I didn’t realize it at the time, but… I know it now. It’s the truth.”

_We’re always taken away._

She’d been present during his regression and remembers his words. But now she realizes the words have also been true of the two of them over the years. Every time they sat vigil at one another’s bedside. Her abduction, her cancer. His own abduction. When he’d been forced to leave her behind with their son. And, looking down at the torn photograph, she realizes: this, too; the final insult, her own decision to leave him.

He holds up the photograph of himself, and she knows he can see in his own expression a man who has no clue, no idea of the heartbreak he’s in for. Time has dulled the sting but the truth of it remains.

“Are you suggesting that I’m only with you now because it’s fated? Because it’s written in the stars?” she asks.

He shrugs. “Maybe it is the only reason.”

She turns to face him. “I refuse to believe we are simply victims of our own circumstances, Mulder,” she explains. “That this was preordained, unavoidable. Not us.”

She reaches out, taking both of his hands in hers. They fit together perfectly. 

“I chose this,” she declares. “I chose you. I chose us.”

He grins, safe in the knowledge that regardless of what may or may not have been foretold, they are right here, side by side, by choice.

Mulder pulls her towards him, kissing her deeply, his hand dropping to her abdomen and rubbing softly. 

“You know, I feel as if I’ve lived a million lives with you already, just in this one,” he mumbles against her lips. 

“Each one has made you wiser, that’s for sure.” When she pulls away she smiles, smooths his hair back. She looks into his face, sees lines of age, miles behind them both, but the unmistakable wisdom of a sage. She sees endless, abiding love. She sees her past, her present, and her future. 

Later this evening, after they’ve made the love they owe to themselves every single night for the rest of their lives, they will recreate the photograph: him beneath the sheets, her nestled into his chest. Both smiling, looking to that future, locked in a timeless embrace that spans a thousand lifetimes.

But for now, they will stand side by side and watch the sunset, right here in this field.

  
  



End file.
